Thursday, February 25, 2010

#5 State of Your Research Prospectus (freewrite, 10 minutes)

My thinking has come very far just from the start of the topic. In the beginning I knew I wanted to do something related to Biometrics, as that has always interested me since the day that Professor Heishman introduced it to the class. From this fairly vague topic I had to then research into some of the more narrow topics within this field. I had previous knowledge of security and privacy being problems with this system, and thought that that would be a very manageable topic considering these methods are closing in on the general population fast, and they will more than likely be implemented in most place within the nextseveral years. Knowing that security and privacy are problems, I started hypothesizing different questions regarding that subject, making sure to keep on that single narrow subject. With this I found that the question should involve some sort of new "method" for guarding the general public against the security and privacy concerns of biometrics, after all, almost all Computer Science journals that I have read propose some sort of alternative method that gets the job done in a much more efficient way. From this question it was fairly easy to devise the problem since the question was initially derived from a problem that the population was having. Using the question the problem was very straightforward and concerned how people felt towards the security and privacy problems and how those people can be put at risk by using biometrics.

Although I haven't really started the review of the literature, I feel this won't be a very hard part. Most of the general information concerning biometrics is widely available, and in fact I have already found many sources using the keywords "Biometrics & Privacy" which will help me in my methodological literature review. In developing my literature review, I have learned to make the subject as broad as possible so that the audience will be able to tell that I have "done my homework" concerning the topic at hand. With this in mind I plan to take a thematic approach of the methods used in biometrics, jumping around to the most prominent topics in biometrics by explaining how some of the more famous theories have been derived and are used in everyday biometrics.